Eldenheim
Community Size and Description Home to approximately 400,000 citizens. (87% being human) Eldenheim is a moderate sized city located in a swampy inlet off the Bay of Amara. It is an older city with many crumbling stone buildings interlaced with newer wooden structures (as wood is much more common in the area than stone). The majority of the city is on the Eastern side of the inlet, but in recent years the city has spread to the Western side as well to accommodate the influx of residents since being conquered by Lunaris. Customs Eldenheim is home to a large amount of superstitious people, which shapes the customs of the city. Shops and homes often feature decorations meant to ward off evil and bring prosperity to that location. Anybody possessing magical ability and not affiliated with the country’s Seers is shunned to the point that some shops will refuse their service and people will move to the other side of the street to put as much distance between themselves and those they view as unnatural. Town Trade Fish and pearls are the two main exports. History Eldenheim was established no less than 450 years ago as a coastal city-state focused on trade. The exact date of its founding and other important facts about the early years of the city have been lost since Lunaris conquered it 27 years ago. The area around the city-state was considered uninhabitable due to the thick mud and frequent flooding of the bay that washed away earlier settlements until a very wealthy lord named Justinian personally funded a project to bring in stone strong enough to withstand being washed away. A system of levies was quickly put in place as the first stone buildings were constructed. It is unknown when the first instances of superstition began to emerge in the city-state, but there is little evidence of it prior to 397 3A when a group known as the seers first began to be mentioned. The Seers, according to the little remaining history documents, started out as a small group of those who possessed the gift of magic and used their gifts to protect Eldenheim from outside threats- namely other magical threats and dark creatures. By the time of the city-state’s fall to Lunaris in 558, The Seers had grown to be abundantly controlling over magic in the region. If you were born with the talent, you joined them or you died. If you made a pact with an unnatural being, you joined them or you died. The only people outside of their group allowed to practice magic were clerics and paladins. This policy of putting magic users to death if they didn’t join was abolished when Lunaris took over, but the general distrust remained. Most of the seers have forcibly been relocated to Coria and are very strictly controlled by the king, but Eldenheim still gleefully boasts of their origins. Eldenheim was ruled by a council of twelve merchant family nobles. Among these nobles was a woman named Amara (named after the bay, not the other way around) who represented the Rivers family (A successful merchant family of pearls). When the Lunaris threat first presented itself, she was the only one of the twelve families who didn’t pack up and abandon the city. Instead she donned armor and waged war with the rest of the people, savagely beating back several waves of the Lunaris Army before the city-state finally fell. Ten of the eleven families who fled were permanently exiled from the city while one was re-instated as governor of the region thanks to his cooperation with Lunaris. The Rivers family, meanwhile, were burned at the stake for their resistance.